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sleep deprivation

Think you’re getting enough sleep? You might want to think again because this test will make you realize how much sleep you’re actually missing.

The new tool, The Lost Sleep Calculator will reveal your sleep loss to show your weekly, monthly, yearly and even lifetime deprivation, as well as what else you could have done in that time.

The tool also reveals how many hours people have been kept awake thinking about various things, such as food, work and sex.

Visitors to the site are asked to input their age and how many hours of sleep they got during the night before.

The team at the interior brand Hillarys.co.uk are behind the Lost Sleep Calculator.

A spokesperson for the site who created the tool said: ‘Many of us get into that competitive tiredness debate, where we feel like we are far more tired than our partner or peers and are far more stressed.

‘It’s commonplace to complain of feeling like a zombie, but are we really as sleep deprived as we think?’

The ‘Lost Sleep Calculator’ Reveals How Sleep Deprived You Are

Ariana Huffington, author of “The Sleep Revolution” and The Huffington Post editor-in-chief tells Business Insider the 8 common sleep mistakes people do that contribute to a bad night’s sleep.

Skipping your workout

Studies have shown that morning and afternoon workouts can increase a person’s quality and amount of sleep at night. One study found that exercise adds around 45 minutes of extra sleep.

“Staying active won’t cure sleep complaints,” Rodyney Dishman, a researcher at the University of Georgia told Huffington for her book, “but it will reduce the odds of them.”

Eating a late-night meal

“If we have a big meal and then go straight to bed, our sleep is not going to be as restorative because our digestive system is occupied digesting, instead of everything being able to slow down and recharge for the next day,” Huffington tells Business Insider.

Eating earlier in the day can also help mitigate acid reflux, which often keeps people up at night and is exacerbated by sleeping on a full stomach.

Not unwinding before bed

“When stress rises and becomes cumulative during the day, it’s much harder to fall asleep at night because it’s harder to slow down and quiet our brains,” Huffington says.

One way to unwind, referred to as the “mind dump,” involves writing down all the things you need to do the next day before bed. This could help empty your mind and tell your brain it no longer needs to run through your to-do list for the rest of the night.

Scanning your smartphone in bed

The LED screens of our smartphones give off what is called blue light, which studies have shown can damage vision and suppress production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate the sleep cycle.

“For me, the key is to every night before I’m going to go to sleep, thirty minutes before, turn off all of my devices and gently escort them out of my bedroom,” Huffington says.

Working in bed

The light given off by your laptop can also prevent your brain from releasing melatonin, and working in bed likely means you’re not giving yourself enough time to unwind before sleep.

Sleep orders and strengthens our memories

Sleep helps the brain file the day’s activities away. As we sleep, the brain fast-forwards through the patterns of brain activity that occurred during the day. This replay not only organizes memories, but also strengthens the microscopic connections between nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s own filing system.

Sleep may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia

Lack of sleep, or sleeping less than five hours a night, can lead to a build-up of beta-amyloid, a toxic protein that forms harmful plaques in the brain of those with Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia. Getting a good seven hours of sleep a night can reduce the risk that these plaques accumulate in our brains.

Sleep makes the brain stronger

There’s a reason we feel more clear-headed after a good night’s sleep: we are. Sleep boosts alertness, replenishing the neurotransmitters that organize the neural networks in our brains. These networks are essential not only for memory, but also for learning, mental performance and problem solving.

Sleep gives the brain time to detox

Sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins (including harmful proteins) that build up during waking hours. Our brains have a drainage system based on the movement of clear cerebrospinal fluid through channels surrounding the blood vessels. The process, has been named the brain’s glymphaticsystem by researchers.

Sleep enables our brains to perceive pleasure

The link between sleep and pleasure has to do with stress. The more stressed we are, the less we sleep; the less we sleep, the more stressed we get. The result is lowered levels of DHEA, the “life is good” hormone. Without sufficient DHEA, it’s harder for us to experience happiness. It doesn’t just seem as if we’re in a bad mood. Chemically, we are.

Sleep and the Brain – The Healing Power of Sleep

After 24 Hours: You May Have Trouble Focusing

The biggest thing that happens when you’re sleepless for 24 hours (or more) is that your ability to focus and pay attention slips, according to a 2010 analysis of studies published in Psychology Bulletin. They found that the big thing to suffer was “simple vigilance”, or your ability to pay attention to one kind of stimuli at a time.

The brain also finds it a lot more difficult to filter out relevant information from everything it picks up. A study from the Journal of Neuroscience found that, after one night without sleep, people were much less able to filter out irrelevant stimuli, leading to confusion from taking in too much information.

36 Hours: You May Struggle To Remember Things

One study showed that, while even a little bit of sleep deprivation has a negative effect on the cardiovascular system, after 39 hours without sleep, the pressure on the subjects’ hearts had increased, with a higher heart rate and bigger variations in blood pressure.

At this point of sleep deprivation, your cognitive performance is deteriorating, too. You won’t be able to recall faces properly, and your ability to remember words will be significantly impaired.

48 Hours: You May Get Sick More Easily

The body really starts to be under stress. The immune system in people deprived of two days of sleep is pretty drastically different from the body of someone who has gotten enough rest; levels of NK cells, or “natural killer” white blood cells, which are a key part of the body’s immune response, fell dramatically in people deprived of sleep for 48 hours in one study.

72 Hours: You May Be A Total Mess

The interesting thing about serious sleep deprivation is that it doesn’t make you feel uniformly hopeless. Instead, it makes your psychological and motor responses incredibly unstable. A study of people deprived of sleep for three to four days found that, when it came tasks where they had to pay attention, their performance was as erratic as hell: their ability to focus fluctuated madly and tried hard to compensate, but couldn’t maintain a constant for more than a few seconds. The scientists thought that, by this point, they weren’t either fully awake or asleep.

Sleep Deprivation and Health – What Happens When You Don’t Sleep for Days

How much slow-wave sleep a teenage boy gets may predict whether he is at risk for insulin resistance and other health issues, according to Jordan Gaines, a Penn State neuroscience researcher.

Gaines analyzed results collected through the Penn State Child Cohort in order to study long-term effects of SWS loss from childhood to adolescence. The cohort included 700 children from the general central Pennsylvania population, ages 5 to 12. Eight years later, 421 participants were followed up during adolescence — 53.9 percent were male.

Participants stayed overnight both at the beginning of the study and at the follow-up and had their sleep monitored for nine hours. At the follow-up appointment, participants’ body fat and insulin resistance were measured, and they also underwent neurocognitive testing.

Gaines found that in boys, a greater loss of SWS between childhood and adolescence was significantly associated with insulin resistance, and this loss was marginally associated with increased belly fat and impaired attention. However, Gaines did not find any associations between SWS and insulin resistance, physical health or brain function in girls.

Importantly, the participants’ sleep duration did not decline significantly with age, suggesting that the effects observed were due to a loss of this “deeper” stage of sleep, according to the researcher.

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